Roan (The Henchmen MC 17)

Then I could focus on other things.

Like what had happened.

What was wrong with me.

Taking a breath as deep as I could with the pressure building in my chest, I let out a scream I never would have known I was capable of before, something shrill and animalistic, something piercing.

It felt like ages as my throat got raw before someone finally made their way closer, as voices surrounded me.

My brain, so overwhelmed, so defeated, sensed rescue in sight, and gave up again, allowed me to sink into the blissful oblivion.__The next time I woke up, I felt swirly.

Really, that was the only way to describe it.

It was like when you were anxious at the dentist, and they gave you sweet air, and you felt like you were humming inside your own skin.

That was what I felt like.

Which, if you asked me, was infinitely better than the screaming, unyielding pain that had been there before.

Before.

Before the explosion.

My eyes flew open at that, taking in something that would be recognizable in just about any country in the world thanks to the starkness, the sounds, the smells.

I was in a hospital room, resting on a slightly inclined bed with a row of windows to my right, showing me the harsh, bright light that had to be evidence of late afternoon.

It had been nighttime the last I remembered anything.

I had been out since then?

Even as the thought formed, my gaze moved downward, finding my leg with steel bars sticking out in too many places to count, and hanging from one of those contraptions I had seen in movies that I always thought were there only for dramatic effect, not actually based on real medical equipment.

Yet there it was.

Holding my shattered leg up.

My breath felt caught in my chest as my gaze moved over the rest of me, half paranoid that I might be missing a limb or two if the pain I had felt after the explosion was anything to go by.

I found my second leg, casted, but not riddled with metal bars under the blanket.

Curious, I pulled the blanket away, finding the cast cut off below the knee, but the skin above it was riddled in bruises and stitched in places.

There was a tightness around my core that I couldn't quite place right away, but when I went to place my hand there, I felt an unfamiliar heaviness.

A cast.

I had remembered not feeling my arm before, and I guess I had to count myself lucky that it was just broken, not paralyzed or amputated.

My other arm rose, trailing lines for the IV, carefully pressing over my face and head, finding more sore spots than ones that didn't hurt, and the sharp juts of stitches down the left side of my head.

Incredibly, my first thoughts weren't about what kind of damage could have been done to the tender bits my head held in, but of the fact that they had shaved my hair around the wound to have a clean space to stitch up in.

It was no small - and ridiculous - surge of vanity considering all the other things that were clearly wrong with me.

I almost didn't want access to a mirror. I didn't want to see what had been done to me.

But then again, I had to see.

"No no no," a nurse said a few minutes later when I awkwardly tried to plant my good hand down on the mattress to try to sit up straighter, attempting not to pinch the lines of fluids being fed through it. "You can't move like that," she informed me, coming to the side of the bed, hitting a button that slowly angled me upward slightly. But just slightly. I guessed maybe the leg hanging contraption made it hard to let me sit up all the way. "How do you feel?" she asked, checking the monitor that was hooked up to the little clip thing on my finger and the cuff on my arm.

"Mostly numb," I told her, it being the truth.

"Good. Numb is good right now. Do you remember what happened?" she asked, face trying to school itself into blankness, but there was no denying the concern in her light brown eyes.

"There was an explosion," I told her. "And I think I was crushed."

"Yes. You were rescued and brought here. You had surgeries," she told me, pressing a hand to my good arm, a reassuring little gesture. "The doctor will be in to tell you more about that, but you are healing now. And resting will help that."

"Have... how was everyone else?" I asked, stomach twisting.

It was cruel, maybe, for me even to think it, but I couldn't find too much sadness at the idea of my uncle not making it out of the rubble. And I had no emotional attachment to my aunt. But the staff? Ani, especially?